In mid-April 1998, I read Richard Holmes’
magnificent Shelley—The Pursuit (1974),
the first biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley I’d ever read. I had only recently
learned, as I mentioned earlier, that Shelley’s middle name rhymed with fish, not with fishy, the way I’d been pronouncing it since my first required
reading of Shelley's “To a Skylark” in high school and had suffered a first-stanza
collision with the word wert, a word
that convinced me, first, that poets could just make up any old word they
wanted to and, second, that poets were, well, not like Real Men. I mean,
really, in our literature anthology the picture of Shelley (Hey, isn’t that a girl’s name?And Percy isn’t much better!)
showed a soft-featured young man with long hair, and long hair in 1961 meant
only one thing to my crude crowd and me: Queer.
Shelley’s use of thou and thy and pourest confirmed it. (We were—I
was—very, very dumb and bigoted in 1961.)

Thirty-seven years later, in Holmes, I started to
learn that I could not have been more wrong about him—in many ways. Shelley,
for one thing, loved women—oh, did
he!—so much so that his percolating libido contributed to the suicide of his
first wife, Harriet, and made Mary, in the last years of his life, desperately
unhappy about his attentions to other women in their circle—and even to a young
woman living in a convent.

He was also a ferociously curious and gifted young
man. (Dead at 29, he never got to be even middle-aged.) His father—Sir Timothy—was
a far more conventional and conservative man, and his son baffled him
(eventually angered him) in just
about every way possible. One example: In his first months at Oxford, Bysshe,
19, and a friend (Thomas Jefferson Hogg) composed and published (anonymously) a
pamphlet they called The Necessity of
Atheism. The Oxford authorities were not pleased and, after discovering the
authors’ identities, promptly dismissed the two young men. Can you imagine Sir
Timothy Shelley’s shame? His outrage? It would get worse.

Anyway, Shelley’s story began to interest me so much
that I found myself engaged in my own pursuit, charging around to places
related to him, places that had no
real direct connection to Mary, whose life I was supposedly researching and
writing. I’d gone off on a tangent—a detour that, like many other unexpected routes,
traversed terrain sometimes more scenic and dramatic than what lay along the
main road.